Optical fiber protection switch

An optical fiber protection switch that performs automatic protection switching. The optical fiber protection switch performs span and ring switching at the optical layer, thereby negating the need for SONET ADMs to perform the switching at the SONET layer. The optical fiber protection switch includes span switches and ring switches arranged to provide span and ring switching, respectively. The span switches and ring switches are implemented using 2×2 optical switches, for a total of eight 2×2 optical switches in the optical fiber protection switch. The system described herein may utilize SONET terminals and/or ATM switches in a WDM environment to support capacity increases while providing the ring and span switching functionality. A network switching element providing transparent, self-healing optical 4-fiber BLSR (OBLSR/4) is realized by using the optical fiber protection switch described herein.